I’m willing to fail

I’ve thought about what to write for the last few days and I think I know what I want to say. I’m not scared to fail, but I’m scared of not trying and therefore not knowing if I could’ve succeeded or failed.

I have failed a lot in my life, in many different parts of my life. You can learn from failure and not repeat the same mistakes, if you’re smart. By not trying, you are ultimately telling yourself that you aren’t good enough to succeed. You aren’t worth working on and your goals are worth pushing harder for. Maybe this extreme, but I see giving up and not trying as worse than failure because failing means you at least took the steps to accomplish something.

I’m down another half pound and while some might brush that off as nothing, I’m looking at it as a success. I’m now 156.5, which is 17.5 pounds lighter than I was at 21 weeks out. I’m almost a size 6 and I was a 10 when I started. Mentally, I’m still up in the air when I receive unsolicited opinions about my body, my food and my workouts, but I feel for the first time I’m doing something because I want to. Of course my weightloss journey has been about me, but this competition is about going out of my comfort zone, trying new things, trusting a process I’m continuously learning about and lifting heavy things and putting them down.

I was never been someone who would get excited about dead lifting or lifting until failure, but it’s something I thrive on. I love setting a goal, crushing it and setting a new one; while losing fat and gaining some tiny bits of muscle. I am surprising myself all the time with what I have and can accomplish. Having the ability to fail doesn’t mean I necessarily want to fail, but to me it means that I understand I have a lot to learn and that I will learn from my mistakes and failures.

Tonight’s workout is a great example of failure and success.

After meeting this fantastic women named Laurie a few weeks ago, and working out with her this past Friday I learned about drop sets. Tonight’s sets were back and arms. I think this was a perfect wake up for me and my lifting partner because we could feel what it was like to low row higher than our usual weight as well as bring the weight down to where we were when we first started in July. It was easy to laugh at how light the weight lower weights that we mocked used are. For example, we did dumb bell shoulder presses; I used 20, 15 then 10 pounds. I was always the girl in the back of the weight class using 5 pounds, I now use 15 pounds for many dumb bell workouts. I was shocked at how light the 10 pound dumb bells were. We also started using the squat rack, which has made it easier to increase weight and not fear potential injury. While these are clearly successes, low row kicked my butt when I prepped the first set for 70 pounds and I’m sure I’ll feel it in the morning!

Just knowing how far I’ve come in the past 10 weeks makes me hopeful, excited and curious about the next 11 leading up to the show.

I’m not going for perfect, I’m going for the best version I can present at the time. I can always do another show. I can always do more training post the show. But before I get ahead of myself, I’m going to work as hard as I can to make this version awesome.